Sunday, March 12, 2017

Much goodness can be found in a recent American Scholar
essay by William Deresiewicz. Attempting
to make sense of political correctness on college campuses, he discovers an unspeakable
horror, a movement that is diametrically opposed to the freedoms that America
stands for.

Political correctness has become
the shorthand for tyranny, a tyranny that casts a long shadow on the
intellectual labor of educational institutions, that represses differences of
opinion and that writes every discussion into a guilt narrative where straight
white male Americans are oppressing everyone else.

Deresiewicz is struck by the
tyrannical effort to suppress free expression. One can only wonder where the
ACLU is on all of this. True, it has offered some limp denunciations when
speech has been suppressed but it has put its greater fervor into resisting the
American president.

On might well suggest that the
advent of Trump, of a bull in the china shop, represents a gesture of rebellion
against an encroaching tyranny. It you think that it’s just about universities
you have not been paying attention to our government and the media. And if you
think that it’s an accident that this all came into full flower during the
Obama years you have underestimated the damage that the great community
organizer could inflict on the nation.

Just as the defenders of Chairman
Mao formed a cultural revolution to suppress anyone’s thought but his, so too
have the Obama supporters refused to face the truth about his regime. Religions and cults have their gods. They have their messiahs. For the religion of political correctness the messiah is named Obama.

Anyway, Deresiewicz defines the
tyranny:

By
political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on
the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency,
like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural
denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome
beliefs and ideas.

The result, on campus, is that students are afraid to say
anything that might offend. Students are effectively being bullied:

I
listened to students—young women, again, who considered themselves strong
feminists—talk about how they were afraid to speak freely among their peers,
and how despite its notoriety as a platform for cyberbullying, they were
grateful for YikYak, the social media app, because it allowed them to say
anonymously what they couldn’t say in their own name. Above all, I heard my
students tell me that while they generally identified with the sentiments and
norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they thought that it
had simply gone too far—way too far. Everybody felt oppressed, as they put it,
by the “PC police”—everybody, that is, except for those whom everybody else
regarded as members of the PC police.

Since I have often pointed out that politically correct
beliefs function like religious dogma, certainly not like scientific truths, I
am happy to concur with Deresiewicz’s analysis. Students, professors,
fellow-travelers in the media and useful idiots all worship together at what I
have called The Church of the Liberal Pieties.

In his words:

Selective
private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not
Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the
liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes,
which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even
larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those
institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that
religion.

Among the dogmas are environmentalism., race, gender and
sexual behavior:

First,
that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct”
opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is
permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a
right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted.
Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy
trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The
presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse,
and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as
Marx once did.

I am slightly amused to see the name of my friend Michel
Foucault pop up in the minds of these know-nothings. True enough, Foucault was
a gay activist who died of AIDS. I seem to have heard that he thought he was
immune because he was French. If so, he would not have been the only gay
Frenchman to hold that belief.

Be that as it may, the brilliant gay activist also supported
the terrorists of the Weatherman faction of the SDS during the Vietnam Era. I
recall him cheering when the Weatherman committed a successful terrorist
attack. And, let’s not forget, Foucault was also a fervent supporter of the
Ayatollah Khomeni’s Iranian Revolution—you know, the one that considered
homosexuality a capital crime and that hanged gay boys from lampposts in Tehran.

A great leader for the politically correct movement….

When students believe that they are “in full possession of
moral truth” they stifle intellectual debate
and spend their time trying to figure out what they are or are not permitted to
believe and to say.

Deresiewicz explains:

The
assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full
possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly
not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

And....

Dogma,
and the enforcement of dogma, makes for ideological consensus. Students seldom
disagree with one another anymore in class, I’ve been told about school after
school. The reason, at least at Whitman, said one of the students I talked to
there, is mainly that they really don’t have any disagreements. Another added
that when they take up an issue in class, it isn’t, let’s talk about issue X,
but rather, let’s talk about why such-and-such position is the correct one to
have on issue X.

This attitude promotes a self-righteous ignorance, people
who are impassioned about what they do not know, students who cannot deal with
facts and who fly into a rage whenever anyone disputes their opinions. Better
to shut down debate than to expose one’s ignorance to the world.

Deresiewicz explains this salient point:

That,
by the way, is why liberal students (and liberals in general) are so bad at
defending their own positions. They never have to, so they never learn to. That
is also why it tends to be so easy for conservatives to goad them into
incoherent anger. Nothing makes you more enraged than an argument you cannot
answer. But the reason to listen to people who disagree with you is not so you
can learn to refute them. The reason is that you may be wrong. In fact, you are
wrong: about some things and probably about a lot of things. There is zero
percent chance that any one of us is 100 percent correct. That, in turn, is why
freedom of expression includes the right to hear as well as speak, and why
disinviting campus speakers abridges the speech rights of students as well as
of the speakers themselves.

Along with dogma comes heresy. One knows all about this from
the world of Freudian psychoanalysis, an important pseudo-religion that gained
power and prominence during the last century. One has written about it
extensively.

He continues:

Which
brings us to another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means those
beliefs that undermine the orthodox consensus, so it must be eradicated: by
education, by reeducation—if necessary, by censorship. It makes a perfect,
dreary sense that there are speech codes, or the desire for speech codes, at
selective private colleges.

In truth, most true religions have far more tolerance for
differences of opinion than does the new politically correct religion. The new
religion has a totalitarian tinge that reminds Deresiewicz—correctly—of Stalinism:

There
is always something new, as my students understood, that you aren’t supposed to
say. And worst of all, you often don’t find out about it until after you have
said it. The term political
correctness, which originated in the 1970s as a form of
self-mockery among progressive college students, was a deliberately ironic
invocation of Stalinism. By now we’ve lost the irony but kept the Stalinism—and
it was a feature of Stalinism that you could be convicted for an act that was
not a crime at the time you committed it. So you were always already guilty, or
could be made to be guilty, and therefore were always controllable.

If you do not belong to the thought police on today’s
college campuses, you live in fear of offending it. Or else, you take a lot of
STEM courses.

Consider the perniciousness of this totalitarian movement,
one is forgiven for believing that it will not go down without a fight and
without making an awful lot of noise.

5 comments:

And, yes, there is a secular religion called Progressivism with a canonical text, The Narrative, that corresponds to The Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, etc. But the secular religion is not the cause.

The cause is neotenized, spoiled young adults, raised by neoSpockian parents. Their younger brethren can be seen red-faced and squalling in the grocery checkout aisle demanding a treat from the snack shelf.

Frankly, they disgust me. What they need is less coddling and more discipline.

Stuart: And if you think that it’s an accident that this all came into full flower during the Obama years you have underestimated the damage that the great community organizer could inflict on the nation.

Or maybe we could ask Obama of his views? He's made plenty of statements against the illiberal left, and I imagine he'd agree with William Deresiewicz's article at least in the nature of the excesses.

http://reason.com/blog/2016/12/21/president-obama-on-political-correctness---"This is a tricky issue," Obama answered. "Because the definition of political correctness is all over the map. I suspect the president-elect's definition would be different than mine."

The president then offered two definitions of political correctness: the first is simply having good manners. It's wrong to shout racial epithets at people, or to verbally harass them. Objecting to abusive treatment isn't an example of political-correctness-run-amok—or if it is, then political correctness is a good thing. Most people probably want to live in a country where people are encouraged not to scream obscenities at each other.

The second definition of political correctness, according to Obama, is "hypersensitivity that ends up resulting in people not being able to express their opinions at all without someone suggesting they're a victim."

He continued:

My advice to progressives like myself, and advice I give my daughters who are about to head off to college is don't go around just looking for insults. You're tough. If someone says something you don't agree with, engage them on their ideas, but you don't have to feel that somehow because you're a black woman, you're being assaulted. But speak up for yourself.

The president went on to point out that when it comes to political correctness, conservatives are hypocrites. They routinely get themselves worked up, and cite offense, over silly slights, as the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh pointed out in a recent op-ed for The Washington Post:

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it "patriotic correctness." It's a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can't be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn't support the war effort enough.----

The whole tricky issue seems to be that we're all hypocrites, and we don't like to see this failing in ourselves, and so all have one standard we apply to others, and another to ourselves, and when we fail to see this gap, we become the very people and attitudes we claim we hate.

The interesting problem to me is how we can help bridge this gap in others, while not letting our own go unchallenged. Self-righteous condemnation is a mind disease, even when it claims to be calling out self-righteous condemnation of others.

Myself, I'm blaming echo chambers, mostly the modern digital kind, where our increased connectivity enables us to believe our own self-deceptions, by surrounding ourselves with other people with the same blind-spots.

Deresiewicz explains this salient point: That, by the way, is why liberal students (and liberals in general) are so bad at defending their own positions. They never have to, so they never learn to. That is also why it tends to be so easy for conservatives to goad them into incoherent anger. Nothing makes you more enraged than an argument you cannot answer. But the reason to listen to people who disagree with you is not so you can learn to refute them. The reason is that you may be wrong. In fact, you are wrong: about some things and probably about a lot of things. There is zero percent chance that any one of us is 100 percent correct.

No argument from me here, except that reasoned argument is always hard, and all of us look like fools when we try to articulate our muddles beliefs to the world.

It's always fun to mock and provoke your rivals on the "triggers", and it does clearly show their derangement, while not necessarily invalidating your own.

I accept this (new?) religion of the sacred victim (although it may sound like Christianity to some), is extremely confused. And it seems not correctable as long as you can hold the faith that the world can be simply divided between oppressed and oppressors, and all without asking questions. It is as thoughtless as any mob mentality, looking for the next villain to demonize to avoid your own corrupted heart. And it perfectly fits within the known problems of empathy - that encourages us to only see the needs of the home team members.

Jonathan Haidt and others have made a valiant effort in explaining this failing.

Like fish don't know what water is, people don't know what "psychic medium" they inhabit, and so we're all vulnerable to what's hidden right in front of us. Without opposing views, we have no way to see out, even if we know exactly why those opposing views are also corrupted.

Trigger warning offers one suggestion "less coddling and more discipline" and its easy enough to agree, but what sort of discipline?

Coddling is described sometimes as "trophies for all", so in part "discipline" means acknowledging there will be winners and losers, and not all the winners are cheaters, and not all the losers have been cheated. The word "all" itself is a cheat, but its supposed to open a gap of uncertainty for truth to sneak through.

"I think the Left saw Obama as their Caesar who take them across the Rubicon and the final destination. Well he did, but Rome didn't fall and now they know they are fighting for their existence."I did it!